Another observation when trying to fix this issue was that updating the sdk via the sdk manager failed. It tells me that I have Android SDK Platform-tools 16.0.2 and wants to update to 17. Clicking install just hangs forever without doing anything. I assume that both actions indefinitely wait for an answer from the same component. [Update: ] Deleting the component worked. Installing it now showed an issue (in contrast to update which did not show any "red" line in the log) saying that stopping adb does not worked. After killing the adb the update went through but adb still refuses to work.

Update: The suspicion that my installation of adb itself might be broken can be ruled out I guess. I'm using the manual download of the SDK and just tried the adb from the ubuntu repository (4.2.2+git20130218-3ubuntu1) and this hangs at exactly the same spot.

grrrrr! Why? Why? Why is there no timeout or something in adb? Why does traccar – a software that also has an Android client – use ADB's port 5037 for its IntelliTrac component? They use all ports 5000 through 5040.